


The Original of Laura

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Dopplegangers, F/F, Mystery, Navel-Gazing, a touch of horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-26 17:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6249664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A long summer holiday for Carmilla and Laura means a lot of photographs and a full sketchbook. But going through her drawings and pictures, Carmilla begins to notice something uncanny. Appearing again and again in the background is a small figure, always lurking just out of clear sight, a figure who looks just like her girlfriend. As the evidence starts to mount that something is wrong with Laura herself, Carmilla has to face the impossible: </p><p>There is another Laura.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Light Imaginings

Carmilla put down the pencil and hunted around in her folding box for a stick of charcoal. On the paper before her, the humped forms of dunes covered in beach-grass were gathering into focus under a sky filled with tumbling grey clouds. Laura was in the foreground – of course – her back laid against the slope of a dune and sandy legs curled up beneath her. 

She had drawn the beach and the dunes that lay behind it at least a dozen times in the three weeks for which the two girls had occupied their small cottage overlooking the coast. Still more sketches concerned the cottage itself and its little garden, the straggled pine woods thinly shielding the fields from the wind-blasted shore, and several the flocks of wading birds in the saltmarshes a little way along.

In almost all of her artworks she drew Laura. Sometimes she was close to and the landscape a frame. Other times her diminutive figure was a only a shape superimposed on the wastes of water and sand.

“How am I looking?” Laura asked, and hauled herself into a standing position. She skipped over to Carmilla's shoulder and peered at the drawing. 

“Perfect as always, cupcake.” Carmilla tapped her finger on the drawn figure and traced a path gently down the side of her face before realising this would run the risk of smudging the charcoal.

“You done? Fancy heading back, then? The wind's starting to pick up and you know where we can find the warmest blankets.” She performed an exaggerated mime of shivering.

Carmilla smiled and began packing her materials away. She slipped the new drawing in between the leaves of a sketchbook for safekeeping, buckled the box of bits and pieces shut, and slung her arrangement of bags over her shoulders. “Ready.”

They twined their hands together as they left the beach only to release them almost immediately for the ascent up the first face of the dunes. The sand was loose between patches of thin rough grass and progress was slow, but once at the top – Laura, less laden down, helped Carmilla up the final few steps – it was possible to slip gently down the back face into a bed of grit and gravel and from there onto more solid ground. 

A couple of smaller dunes needed further episodes of scrambling and then they emerged on the lee side, shielded from the sharp breeze beginning to speed waves on the sea behind them and cast screaming gulls higher into the air. Laura fished her phone out of her pocket and pressed a few buttons, holding it high to improve what little signal could be found in this place.

“Oh, got a reply from Perry,” she said after a moment's scrutiny. “Says she and Mattie are going to stick around in Rabat until the end of the month and go straight back to Silas from there. So they won't be in Paris when we pass through.”

“Surprised pale-and-curly hasn't shrivelled up in the Moroccan sun by this point,” said Carmilla. A smirk appeared on her face. “She must've been spending a lot of time indoors.” Laura giggled, and wrapped her hand around Carmilla's again. 

“People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones,” she reminded her. “Also, we've been at the mercy of every wind coming in off the sea for nearly a month and I swear your cheeks haven't even gone slightly pink.” Laura's cheeks, by contrast, were stung rosy by the sea spray.

Carmilla rolled her eyes and handed her bags to Laura so that she could swing her leg over the stile back to the path. “Don't you know vampires are pale and interesting, Laura? We don't get windswept.” 

“Hmm, I'll give you pale.” Laura hopped up the stile herself, and dropped down the other side to be caught in Carmilla's arms. “But I'll be the judge of interesting.”

“Oh, I'll show you interesting,” Carmilla kissed Laura on the cheek and raised her eyebrows. “When we're reunited with the warm blankets.” Laura giggled, and the girls picked their way along the sandy path back home.

Their cottage was only a few minutes walk from the beach, shielded from the worst of the North Sea wind by a line of bent and ragged pine trees. It was a small place made of a cobbled mixture of flint and the hard cores of chalk. Outside a patch of garden made only a feeble pretence at domesticity, managing to shelter a few hardy flowers in the crook of its stone wall, but inside was done up with comfort, warmth and modernity. As they rounded the curve of the wall, Carmilla watched contentedly Laura's hand flicking and plucking at the scallop shells set into the top of it like thin battlements.

The mountains of colourful blankets that Laura had somehow managed to acquire from a desultory cluster of shops masquerading as a village some miles away were some compensation for the washout of a late summer. It wasn't cold exactly, but the wind blew cool and blustery enough to provide an excuse for curling up as much as possible – and, to Carmilla's great approval, everything that entailed in the field of entwined limbs and close-pressed bodies. 

“Need anything atrociously sickly?” Carmilla asked, rifling through a cupboard as Laura wrapped herself in fold after fold of wool and hunted around for the yellow pillow. “There's chocolate chip cookies, there's shortbread bites, there's... what even are these?” She inspected the box's list of ingredients with mounting horror. “No, definitely not, only for eating before exercise.”

“No, it's okay.” Laura stretched out contentedly under the green plaid blanket. “I think I've had enough snack food for the day.”

Carmilla looked at her sceptically. “Who are you and what have you done with Laura Hollis?”

“Oh, stop being sarcastic and come watch with me. The Doctor's going to regenerate this episode and you _will_ cry if you have any soul. I made a space for you in my nest, look!”

* * *

From downstairs Carmilla could hear the sound of Laura talking to her father on the phone. It was difficult to imagine how fast he must have been talking at the other end of the line in order to get a word in between the flood of Laura being... Laura. 

Carmilla had taken the floor of the spare bedroom, unused save for dumping their empty suitcases, to bring some order to her portfolio of drawings. From left to right in a wide arc around her were spread three weeks worth of scribblings from their holiday, as well as various pieces done in Holland and on the ferry to England. 

There were a smattering of watercolours as well as pencil and charcoal drawings - although she was less satisfied with her achievements here. She had a tendency to put too much paint on her brush, and of too watery a consistency. In consequence the scenes were washed-out, Laura bleeding out at the edges into an indistinct figure seen as if through deep water.

Before they left his house a month and a half ago, Laura's father had extracted from her a promise to send him a selection of her best drawings of his daughter. Dutifully she began sifting through for a panorama of this latter stage of their holiday. The selection of soft sketches of Laura in bed – minimal in execution but direct in their appreciation - were shuffled off to one side as for Carmilla's personal folder only.

After some thought, she picked up a rough, quick sketch from somewhere on the left. This might be a good one to send Mr Hollis - Laura on the ferry with the receding sight of the Hook of Holland behind her. The two had lived together in the Netherlands years before, so it would be a nice touch to remember. She'd had to sketch the distant coast mostly from supposition and memory since it had taken so long to get the particular expression in Laura's eyes right. It was a hurried work overall - but full of life, right down to the other passengers pressing against the rail to watch their departure.

Carmilla could never remember the process of drawing very clearly afterwards. Her hand would move of itself, following instructions sent through directly from her eyes. Sometimes she would look down at the paper half in surprise at the scene emerging there. This drawing of the ferry had been like that – her conscious attention had been entirely on the way the wind caught Laura's hair in the sunlight, and it was remarkable now to see how closely her pencil had unconsciously captured the varied expressions on the other passengers: worried, relieved, mildly seasick.

Although – looking more closely – there had apparently been a bit of attentional bleed. A girl skulking under a hanging lifeboat over to the right looked far too much like Laura for it to be a coincidence. That's what happens when you sketch a crowd with your mind on somebody in particular. Nevertheless, a good piece of work. Carmilla set the paper aside in a pile.

And here was another good one – the two of them together, just after arriving in their cottage. Laura had charmed a passer-by into taking a lot of pictures of them standing at the door, and then Carmilla had lined those up, seated herself at the place from which they were taken, and produced a drawing lightly coloured with touches of watercolour. She had focused on the details of the garden in the foreground quite a lot, while the background was more thinly sketched in. The shape of the trees was evocative and the rough curve of the dunes behind the cottage provided neat framing, but she'd left out the gorse bushes and the silhouette of a small woman standing amongst them with wind-blown hair that were clear enough in the photographs.

That was odd, come to think of it. There were a dozen different photos in the camera, and Carmilla seemed to remember an interminable process of their visitor checking and rechecking they were in the frame – and then Laura running forward to see what it looked like, and then running back to get in the frame again. It must have dragged on for a good fifteen minutes before Laura realised she'd now delayed the man so long that politeness demanded she invite him in for a cup of tea. But somehow through all these fifteen minutes of scene checking the short windswept figure on the dunes stood there without changing position.

Maybe she was a birdwatcher, lured by the masses of oystercatchers flocking over the saltmarshes. But – and it wasn't quite clear, since she was almost completely silhouetted against the billowing light grey clouds – it looked more as if she was staring down at the cottage itself.

But who knew? Carmilla put the painting on the side with the other.

For a third – well, the one she did today would serve nicely. The pose of Laura resting against the slope of sand, with a book in one hand and those interesting angles formed by her legs. Carmilla briefly entertained a doubt about the suitability of the piece, given that she had faithfully included the long scratch down Laura's calf - result of badly-achieved stile crossing yesterday - but Mr Hollis would surely not count that against her. At least so long as she remembered to mention how carefully they'd disinfected it.

* * *

On the television screen the companion of the hour was doing something dramatic and Laura was, as usual, entranced. Carmilla withdrew into the pages of her book, a volume of Borges pressed onto her by JP with his usual mania for anything library-related.

_In the hermetic books it is written that what is down below is equal to what is on high, and what is on high is equal to what is down below; in the Zohar, that the higher world is a reflection of the lower. The Histriones founded their doctrine on a perversion of this idea._

Were there ever people who actually took this kind of speculation seriously? Whatever, it was amusing to read about.

_They imagined that all men are two men and that the real one is the other, the one in heaven. They also imagined that our acts project an inverted reflection, in such a way that if we are awake, the other sleeps._

What about women? Carmilla asked the book reflexively. Cheap shot. Anyway, her other half was right here beside her, which probably meant this was heaven. Not that she would ever say that thought out loud, she added to herself, not if she wanted to avoid being mocked for an indefinite future.

_When we die, we shall join this other and be him._

Which is a nice excuse for not living this one. Camus would have had things to say about that, Carmilla reflected and felt her focus on the book fading.

As she sat there with Laura nestled up against her side, Carmilla's attention drifted away from strange heresies to contemplate the fall of light on her hair. Gently, careful not to disturb her from the screen, she twined Laura's brown hair between her fingers and contentedly admired the colour.

“Cupcake?” Laura stirred vaguely at the familiar nickname but did not reply. “Cupcake, you've got grey hairs!”

“Hmm? Oh yes, three,” she said.

Carmilla tugged urgently at a lock of hair from the middle of Laura's right crown. “Three? I can only see two.” She sifted through looking for the third.

“One more on the other side. Spotted them the other week.” Laura extricated a hand from her bundle of covers and pointed roughly at the part of her hair where she thought it was.

“You didn't tell me?” Carmilla asked, hurt evident in her voice.

Laura bent round to look at her girlfriend in confusion. “Carm, what's up? They're just hairs. Everyone gets a few, even in their early twenties.”

“I suppose.” She bit the inside of her cheek before remembering herself and giving Laura a kiss on the cheek. “Sorry, creampuff. Didn't mean to disturb you.” She gave a tight smile and Laura settled down against her chest again to resume admiring the Doctor's clever plan to beat the monster of the week. Carmilla fidgeted, tugging the edge of Laura's sleeve.

“Don't you have any?” Laura asked her after putting up with the fidgeting for a few minutes.

“No,” she said shortly. “And I never will.” Nineteen forever.

Laura sat up again, understanding. “Oh. Oh, I see.” She paused, eyes close on Carmilla's. “Do you want to talk about it?” Carmilla sighed.

“I don't know. Would it help?” Her voice sounded too hollow, even to her. “I mean it's not like you grew them on purpose.”

The joke fell flat and Laura didn't laugh. “No. But you're scared about what will happen when I get more, aren't you?” She didn't reply, so Laura continued. “I won't leave you, you know. Not ever.”

“I know.” They kissed, and Carmilla was grateful that she could stop the conversation this way at least.

 _In such a way that if we are awake, the other sleeps_ , she read again from then book before her when Laura had lain down on her lap and returned her attention to the screen. A bit of an exaggeration in their case, since her nocturnal habits were somewhat less pronounced now that she had somebody else to sync up with. But there were still long nights where she lay awake for hours listening to Laura's slow breathing and watching her soft face in its untroubled sleep - an inverted reflection in so many ways of herself.

But there would be no union in death, for it had already come for Carmilla once and would not come again unbidden. She tried to put it out of her mind. There was time for all of that later without spoiling the today.

The episode ended before too much longer with good triumphant and evil vanquished, which is what fiction means. Laura seemed to feel it best not to try to continue the previous conversation. All thoughts of grey hair were driven from Carmilla's mind as they kissed again, and she felt all the brooding and worrying melt away in the face of Laura.

She drank in the taste and smell of Laura's skin and hair. Every time, Carmilla found herself amazed at how inexhaustible she was. She could never get bored of her, never run out of places to kiss. And there was more, she thought with anticipation as she moved from Laura's mouth to her cheeks and down her neck to nip gently at her collarbone. She let her kisses drift over Laura's shoulder and up the side of her neck, where they began to circle. 

“Oh, I see...” was Laura's amused response. “Thirsty, are we?”

Carmilla only let her mouth open wider and her fangs extend to brush against Laura's skin. She heard an intake of breath as Laura registered the teeth and smiled against the girl's skin. So much of the pleasure of this was listening to the excitement running through Laura, quickening her heart and speeding her breathing.

“Carm...” she heard whispered in her ear as she continued her teasing.

“What is it, cupcake?”

“You know what it is,” Laura groaned. “Get on with it.”

Finally Carmilla bit down and let the blood well up into her mouth. The momentary satisfaction of rewarded anticipation was short-lived though, and she choked in the realisation. It tasted all wrong – bitter, ozonic, far too salty. It wasn't Laura's blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quotation from Borges is from the short story _The Theologians_ , published as part of the collection _The Aleph_.


	2. Sublime and Beauteous Shapes

Early the next afternoon, Carmilla emerged into the living room after a worried catnap to find Laura curled up on the sofa with a large bowl and a spoon almost the same size.

“Ice cream, Laura?” she asked sceptically. “Really?”

“It's summer!” she explained. “Look, I got you a bowl of your own.”

Carmilla looked out of the window at the ragged sea birds being tossed to and fro in the air. “It's an excuse for summer. You're wrapped up in blankets on the sofa because it's too windy to go out without being blown into the sea. Earlier there was rain being blown horizontally and you're thinking – ice cream?”

“The locals don't see the contradiction,” Laura said, spooning more cookie dough flavoured ice cream from the pot into her bowl. “I saw a couple on the beach the other day eating cones while wearing coats.”

“Cupcake, the English are just weird and you don't need to imitate them. The Doctor will forgive you.” She took the second bowl anyway and scooped her own portion in. She thought to herself as she ate. “Remember that place we found in Amsterdam, by that lovely bridge?”

“Oh, yeah!” Laura beamed. “With the frozen raspberries as sprinkles?”

She did remember that, then. Carmilla pondered, trying to think of something to ask from far enough back.

“Now there's something that would justify eating with a cake slice,” she said raising an eyebrow.

Laura's brow wrinkled. “When did we-” Carmilla's heart skipped a beat, but then Laura added, “Oh _God_. The break-up video. That was... embarrassing.”

So she remembered that. Or possibly remembered seeing the video, anyway. There were too many possibilities – but Carmilla had come to the conclusion that the taste of Laura's blood last night was not an isolated incident.

She had watched Laura, earlier in the morning when she'd finished her shower and was spending a long time getting ready. Carmilla had crept out of the window and hung herself silently from the eaves of the cottage, looking into the bathroom through a gap in the ivy. 

Laura had spent a very long time looking into the mirror, Carmilla looking on and feeling like a spy. Not that she hadn't watched Laura get dressed many times before, but that was open and therefore different. She continued staring into the mirror for several minutes, not moving or doing anything else. Normally she was in and out quickly, rarely bothering to fuss over her appearance – though it didn't look like that was what she was doing today either.

She just stared unmoving into the mirror at her face as if she'd never seen it before – or perhaps as if she were carefully inspecting it in case of a mistake.

When the ice cream was used up and Laura had been lulled by Scandal into a doze, Carmilla went through both their phones as well as through the camera. She zoomed into Laura's face in whatever pictures it appeared in. Leaving Silas at the beginning of their summer, Perry and LaFontaine pressed against her sides. At Laura's house, with Mr Hollis grinning with one arm around her and the other carefully holding the barbecue tongs at a safe distance. In Italy covered in sunshine in a pale stone piazza. Outside a dozen galleries and museums in France looking faintly bored. In cafés in Holland; here in England by the sea.

And nothing amiss in any of them. Little spots or blemishes that appeared on her face continued for the next couple of days before fading. Her hair grew steadily, then was cut in Paris. She caught a cold in Amsterdam and was red-nosed for a few days.

When was the last time she bit Laura? Carmilla tried to remember. When they were back at Silas - or during the winter holidays - it was a commonplace event, but she hadn't done it too often this summer. The marks took some time to heal and that could be a problem when travelling in public while it was too hot to cover up. Bruges, that must have been it. On their way up to the Netherlands. It appeared in some of the pictures - or rather a discreet plaster covering the mark appeared. There hadn't been anything wrong with her blood that night, so whatever happened to her must have happened after then. It might even have happened only a week or two ago.

But if there was nothing wrong with Laura herself, what about _around_ her? As she sat there and thought, the unexpected girl she'd spotted on camera yesterday began to take on a new significance. Because the little figure silhouetted on the dunes was about Laura's height. And then there was the girl she'd absent-mindedly drawn on the ferry, the girl who – at least in her drawing – looked just like Laura.

The camera's screen was small but Carmilla managed to work out how to zoom in to the backgrounds. She went back and forward initially at random, but after things began to pop out she started a more methodical trawl.

There was nothing definite until the ferry from Holland when the girl lurking under the shadow of a hanging lifeboat appeared, but now that she knew what she was looking for other examples started to crop up. Standing in the shadows of an overhanging house in the village, lurking between the battered trunks of pines, drifting across the salt marshes at the edge of the frame – always there was something, some half-clear hint of a person who could possibly have been another Laura.

No single photograph was conclusive, and in many of them the haunting figure revealed no more than half a face, or a turned-away pose. But put them together and the image of Laura began to swim into view, always following them, never quite close enough to be absolutely sure.

She sighed and put the camera away. Collecting vague and ambiguous evidence would be no good without a way to put it together.

* * *

Carmilla sat on the floor of the spare bedroom surrounded by open books and loose pages. A cottage in Suffolk was not a good place to research unspeakable metaphysical horrors, and in the atrocious weather she hadn't been able to contact LaFontaine and J.P. back at Silas or Perry and Mattie in Morocco. In the circumstances she'd done the best she could with vague memories and fragments of conversation dragged up from centuries past, coupled with whatever she could pick out from poetry.

Yesterday's story from Borges lay propped open with an arrow pointing to the passage about the strange heresy of the Histriones.

 _Changeling_ , she'd written on one piece of paper lying to the right of it. _Doppelgänger. Fetch._

 _Possession?_ on another. _Doesn't explain memories._

In the middle of the room, the complete works of Shelley lay open to a circled passage in the first act of _Prometheus Unbound_ :

_They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,_   
_The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,_   
_Met his own image walking in the garden._   
_That apparition, sole of men, he saw._   
_For know there are two worlds of life and death:_   
_One that which thou beholdest; but the other_   
_Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit_   
_The shadows of all forms that think and live,_   
_Till death unite them and they part no more;_   
_Dreams and the light imaginings of men,_   
_And all that faith creates or love desires,_   
_Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes._   
_There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade._

She sat back and blew out a breath. It was all so... tenuous. What did she have to go on, really? Laura's blood tasted off. Fine, but there were other things that could make that happen, not just Laura herself having been replaced. A bat-wing bracelet, for example, although not exactly that for obvious reasons. There was somebody who – as far as she could tell – looked exactly like Laura lurking in the background of several of their holiday photos and drawings. Fine, but maybe they were still out there rather than inside the cottage impersonating the girl. Laura was looking in the mirror in weirdly intense way. Right, but hadn’t Carmilla herself drawn the girl's attention to her hair?

Carmilla stood up and wandered downstairs to fetch a glass of blood. She needed to _think_. 

Are there perfect imposters in the world? she asked herself.

But how would you know if there were? Came the reply.

She filled the glass and climbed the stairs once more, trying to squeeze a conclusion out of a lack of premises.

“Hey, what's all this?” Laura asked from the middle of the room as she re-entered. She was sitting on the floor just where Carmilla had been, leafing through the pages of notes and speculations.

“Oh, I was just-” Carmilla waved her free hand vaguely. “You know, following up some ideas. Camus, you know. He had some interesting things to say and I... wanted to think about them.”

“Like what?” She tapped absently at the volume of Shelley with its circled passage.

Carmilla sat down and tried to casually tidy away the more damning examples of her research. She was pretty sure Laura had never read Camus so, thinking of an alternative explanation for her research... “Like about identity. Like how we're different people yesterday than we are today, but we're still the same person, you know?”

Laura wrinkled her brow. “Is this one of these 'philosopher states the bleeding obvious at great length' things?”

“Kind of,” Carmilla shrugged. “It's just – I've been thinking about it a lot. About how much I've changed thanks to you.” Laura smiled back at that, and Carmilla began to relax.

“And there I was thinking you might have been replaced by a double,” Laura joked. Carmilla felt a moment of sudden tension again and tried to suppress it.

She traced a pattern on the floor with her finger. “Well, that's the difference about growing and being replaced, right? We becomes different people, but we see all the steps on the way. Imagine if I'd stopped being broody suddenly one day. You'd think I'd been stolen away. But because you've seen me change it's different.”

Laura made the sceptical face she so often did when Carmilla talked philosophy. “Not sure you've quite stopped being broody, Sulky McVampire. Remember when we were in Paris and you were huffy all day because the Cezannes had been sent to Canada for an exhibition?” Carmilla laughed and nodded her head in agreement.

Laura crawled over and settled against her shoulder. She was silent for a bit, but then spoke nervously. “This is about the other day, isn't it? When you spotted my grey hairs.” Carmilla said nothing, so Laura continued. “You're scared there'll come a day when you're still the same as now but I'm all old and different, right?”

“Hey, creampuff-”

“It's okay, Carm. I know it must be scary. We'll have time to work it out.”

Carmilla tried to focus on the problem at hand. “Yeah. Sure. So let's not worry about that now.”

After a few moments in silence, Laura spoke again and Carmilla could hear her heart suddenly beating rapidly through her shirt. “I suppose...” she began. “I suppose it's all about what you know and what you don't know.”

In her own chest, Carmilla felt her heart freeze. “What do you mean, Laura?”

“Well – all this identity stuff. It's all about getting used to it, isn't it? We're okay with people changing slowly because we have time to get used to the differences and so we know it's the same person underneath. Sudden changes don't give us that, not at once. But suppose,” she continued slowly and carefully, “suppose someone could change in a way that you didn't notice.”

“What would that mean?” Carmilla asked. Her voice came out in a whisper, quite unbidden.

“Then it wouldn't matter that they weren't the same person, would it? It would only matter if you _knew_ about it. And you wouldn't have to find out if you didn't go searching.”

Carmilla drew back and fixed her eyes on Laura's wide expression.

“Cupcake...”

Laura shook her head. “Don't,” she urged. “Don't.”

Carmilla could feel the floor dropping out from underneath her. She took a breath, and then another one before asking. “Are you really Laura?”

She was left sitting there as Laura – or somebody - ran out of the room.

* * *

The path to the beach was gravelly but Carmilla ran on bare feet. Ahead of her, Laura seemed too far ahead – she had never had any problem catching up with her before. The short figure scrambled up the dunes at a huge speed and Carmilla vaulted the stile without slowing her pace. Where was she going?

“Laura!” Carmilla shouted. “Laura!” Or whoever.

She was in the middle of the beach by the time Carmilla crested the dunes, taking them in cat form. She caught Laura at the edge of the surf, where tiny wavelets could cover her feet but no more. A woman again, Carmilla faced her girlfriend – if it was her girlfriend – across three feet of shifting sand. Already around them their first footsteps were oozing back into the flat beach.

“Why did you run?” she demanded. “How did you move that fast?”

Laura's eyes had tears welling up in them. “What's going on in your head?” she wailed. “You ask if I'm really me!” A gust of wind tore through her hair and flattened her clothes against her, and every inch was Laura to the letter.

Carmilla bit her lip to stop herself asking forgiveness. Conclusions first.

“Carm, what's up? Why are you being like this?” It was Laura's voice, and Laura's manner, and Carmilla's heart cracked open as she heard herself apologising again and again inside her head. But outside she kept her mouth shut. There was the memory of blood and the girl running so fast a vampire could hardly catch her up.

“Laura, I- I need to know something,” she said firmly. “Will you give me your arm?”

“My arm?”

“Please,” Carmilla insisted, and Laura stretch it out. She took it, feeling the gentle yielding of Laura's skin and watching closely the little cluster of three freckles at the base of her thumb. Very carefully, very slowly, she kissed Laura's wrist and heard her sigh. Then, quick as a flash, she bit down.

Laura shrieked, and pulled back. Carmilla let her. 

“What the _fuck_?” Laura demanded. “What is going on?”

But Carmilla took a step backwards, dragging her feet in the sticking sand. It wasn't Laura's blood. It really wasn't. It tasted of the sea, of rotting things, of stale and stagnant brackish water.

“You're not Laura,” she said simply. Tears stung her eyes. “You're not Laura and I want her back. Where is she?”

Laura's manner shifted. Subtly, something else came to the surface and a hint of a smile emerged. She moved forwards and reached out a hand to touch lightly against Carmilla's cheek.

“Oh Carm,” purred the thing with Laura's voice. “Can't you just be happy with what you have?”

Carmilla batted her hand away. “You're not Laura.”

“I could be,” pouted the creature. “You've already know I have all her memories. I can be her as hard as you like – unless you'd like to make a few changes? A little less on the Doctor Who, a little more on the shameless public touching, maybe?” She stepped a little closer and Carmilla caught her scent – Laura's scent.

“I want my Laura back.”

The thing rolled its eyes and folded its arms. The expression was exactly Laura's when she was in a huff and she spoke sarcastically just as Laura did when annoyed. “She's gone, Carm. If only... if only you had someone to take her place. Someone just like her. Can you think who might be suitable?”

She unfolded her arms and turned a circle in the surf, looking at Carmilla under half-lowered eyelids.

“Like what you see? Of course you do, you've seen it before. Tell me Carmilla, when we made love last night, did you notice the difference? Or the day before? Didn't I kiss like her? That's a rhetorical question,” it added. “I know I did.”

“I want my Laura back,” Carmilla repeated.

“Are you sure? But she's so _fragile_ , Carm. It's too bad she won't live – but then again, who does?” She paused to let that sink in, and then continued. “I do. I'll last. I'm not human, I won't die. Laura's got – what? Sixty, maybe seventy years if you're lucky. I've got forever, which conveniently is just what you've got.”

Carmilla looked at Laura's face. She could look at that face forever, she knew. She could never be bored of it. And sixty years could never be enough – not even to look back on. She sighed. Nevertheless...

“I don't know if you're lying or telling the truth. But I think if I kill you she'll come back,” Carmilla said simply, staring intently. She hoped it was true.

The creature shook her head. “But you can't kill me,” she said simply.

“Banish. Dissolve. Whatever. When you're gone, she'll come back.”

“Are you so sure?” she simpered. “What if I'm all you're getting, Carm? What if this is all of Laura you'll ever get?”

Carmilla cast her eyes down, then took a deep breath. “Then it's not enough,” she said. “It's not enough.”

The creature hissed through Laura's mouth and turned to leave but Carmilla snapped and grabbed hold of its arm with her left hand. Her fangs extended instinctively and she felt Laura's wrist beginning to crack in her grip as the thing struggled to get free. 

Carmilla closed her eyes so that she wouldn't have to see what she was about to do. She brought forward her right hand and let the claws come out. In one smooth moment she thrust and broke through the skin under the ribcage, driving forward towards the heart. But as soon as she felt the flesh give way, it gave way more than she expected and dissolved around her.

Opening her eyes, she saw the thing's face waver and grow watery. The blood oozing over her hand flowed transparent and around her insubstantial heart the creature wearing Laura's face collapsed into a heap of briny water, spattering Carmilla's face with salt and sea spray. She was left alone on the beach.


	3. The Shadows of All Forms

Laura was walking on the waves. They were soft under her feet, but bore her up firmly with each crest and lowered her down again with each trough. No attention was needed; she drifted across the surface on the currents as if sleepwalking and let it all happen to her. She felt warm inside and the coolness of the water and air outside was pleasant. Her eyes were closed and the only sound was that of the swell and the far off surf.

She didn’t know where she was or how long she’d been there. But there was no way to think about it, all ideas just slipped away out of her mind before she could grasp them. She kept walking.

From time to time images flashed through her mind, momentarily calling a spark of attention to them. Carmilla sitting on a beach and sketching her. Curling up in a blanket on the sofa with warm arms around her. Having breakfast in the sunlit morning surrounded by sparrows scolding each other from their perches on the stone wall. The images arose, were noticed, and drained away again.

There were snatches of sound, too, hardly heard over the gentle roaring of the ocean on which she walked. Carmilla’s voice mostly, calling her name. It faded back into the mewing of gulls.

The voice came back and she felt a stirring of awareness within her. 

“Are you really Laura?” she heard.

There was a rushing, like blood pounding in her ears.

“I want my Laura back.” The words sank into her and then fluttered away, but for the first time they had hooks drawing her attention along with them. For a moment she wavered on the rolling sea, did not quite set her automatic footsteps aright.

“It’s not enough,” came Carmilla’s voice, and it came clearly, cutting through the sound of the swell. Around it the churning increased in volume. 

Laura became conscious that the water was not cool at all, but cold. And you couldn’t walk on waves, so how could she be?

Suddenly she felt a stabbing pain, as if an icy cold fist had taken hold of her heart. Her eyes shot open and she tried to scream as she lost her footing and fell into the formless sea. She spluttered salt water, struggled to keep her head above water. And then the great wave came, picking her up like a rag doll and bearing her onwards. The pounding of the approaching surf assaulted her ears as she briefly surfaced only to be dragged down again.

And then it was breaking, throwing her loose in a collapsing torrent of foam. She sucked in air ripe with the stench of rotting seaweed and all around her was the gulls’ screaming. 

As the wave receded her tenuous consciousness registered the fact that she was no longer in the sea. There was mud under her body, yielding as she slowly settled into it. An arm, thrown wide, brushed rough vegetation covering a raised patch of ground. The scene ran through her fingers and escaped.

A memory of a terrible day oozed through her thoughts. _I lost. I feel like I lost us everything. I feel like I lost myself._

She drifted, and in a half-dream she saw herself dancing in a hall of mirrors with another image of herself - until she realized that the image was actually the real her, and so she couldn't be anyone at all.

“Laura!” There was somebody shaking her and daylight on her face. “Laura!”

She opened her eyes. “Carm?”

It was early evening and the light was turning yellow-orange. She lay in a shallow muddy depression in the salt marshes and Carmilla was kneeling next to her with tears in her eyes and wildness on her face. Laura half-registered that ripped black jeans and purple top weren't what she expected her to be wearing. Not what she had been wearing when- when-

“Hey. Hey, you’re all right.” She touched Laura’s cheek, and then softly moved her head aside to expose her neck. Carmilla checked both sides and then smiled with what looked like relief. “No bites from last night. And you haven’t got a scratch on your leg from two days ago. It’s you.”

The words didn’t make any sort of sense to Laura. 

“I was dreaming,” she murmured vaguely. “All about the sea.” She scrabbled up into a sitting position and looked uncomprehending at Carmilla’s concerned expression. She looked almost fearful, Laura thought. “What happened?”

“How long do you think were you dreaming?” Carmilla asked urgently. “What’s the last thing you remember clearly?”

Laura thought hard. “I was here. In the marsh. I’d gone to pick samphire. You remember, the man in the village said it was good to eat. And then I… I think I fell asleep. Or fainted. Did I faint? I dreamed a lot – and now you’ve found me.” She leaned against Carmilla’s shoulder. “I dreamed so much.”

Carmilla took a breath and tilted Laura's chin to make sure she could look into her eyes before she said slowly, “Cupcake, you went out here for your little gathering spree two weeks ago.”

“What?” Laura felt a chasm open up under her, as if the ground had been taken away. “No, I was- I was right here! I... I must have fainted. Right?”

She shook her head. “No, cutie. You've been gone two weeks. Well, sort of. You had an understudy.”

“Can’t be. No one can sleep for two weeks.” She wrinkled her forehead, summing up all the impossibilities. “I’d be starving – I’d have died of thirst!”

“I don’t think you were quite in the world at the time,” Carmilla said, and started teasing some strands of samphire out of Laura's hair. She washed her hands as best she could in the thin trickle of water which filled the gully at low tide.

It was all too much to absorb. One word caught up with her. “Wait - understudy?”

Carmilla sighed and gave her a serious look. “Have I got some explaining to do. Come on.” She hoisted her up, letting Laura lean her weight on her shoulders, and they began the halting walk back to the cottage.

* * *

“It's me,” Laura said when Carmilla showed her a week-old photo of the two of them standing on the top of an old concrete pillbox. “It's me. But it can't be me. I don't remember this!”

“Because it wasn't you, cupcake,” said Carmilla. “We did that last week. After you'd gone to the marsh and got lost in dreamland.”

Laura checked the date-stamp on the camera – she was right. She'd already checked the day from the television and seen the two weeks of text messages from – and to – her father. The responses were exactly the ones she would have sent.

“And you didn't notice anything wrong?” There was a slight tremble to her voice. “You didn't _notice?_ ”

Carmilla shook her head and took her hand. “Nothing. She was exactly like you. _Exactly_. Right down to the little patch of rough skin right here,” and she nudged the tiny scar under Laura's jaw. “Until I bit her, and the blood was wrong.”

“What did you do?” Laura asked with wide eyes.

“I confronted her. She changed – she wasn't you any more. Tried to persuade me to take her instead. I broke her-” Laura gasped. “And she turned back into water. Then I went looking for you.”

“What if you hadn't found me?”

“Not the kind of ending I ever think about, creampuff.” She smiled a crooked smile. “Besides, if she is some kind of double, it would make sense that you can swap places. I had to hope.”

Laura squeezed her hand. She was grateful that at times like these the things that needed to be said had already been said. To try to find the words, right now, to express how grateful she was to Carmilla for being there – for always being there – would be too much. But she had found the words before, one at a time, and now even a touch could serve to renew them when needed.

“Is she gone? For good?” she asked, but Carmilla just shrugged.

“I don't know. I've never seen anything like this. Or heard. I mean, I tried to do some research and there are hints in this or that bit of poetry, but... it's not something I've experienced. Now if you'd been a baby and your changeling was obsessively counting poppy seeds, that'd be a lot simpler to deal with.” Laura found the image amusing despite herself.

“Kind of makes you wonder if there's another Carmilla out there,” she said trying to lighten the conversation. “One with more colourful dress sense, maybe?”

Carmilla sighed at the sally. “Well hey, you could have us on a time-share! And then-” She stopped mid-joke. “My sister,” she said slowly.

“Mattie? What about her?”

“No. No, my birth sister. Elizabeta – you remember I told you about her? She was the older one, she had two years on me. The ball I was murdered at was to celebrate her first child. His name was Wenceslas – she'd married a Polish count. Anyway, she’d had the child and spent a bit of time recovering, and then she came to visit us with her husband and we threw a ball.” Carmilla smiled gently and Laura once again had to remind herself that she had once had a family, had been a sheltered and coddled young girl looking forward to a future.

“It was all very exciting. She looked a bit tired, and a bit older, but we were still very alike. Especially our hair – we got it from our mother. Our birth mother, I mean.”

“And you drank champagne together and danced like fools?” Laura put in. Carmilla tweaked her nose and continued.

“I wore this pale blue gown – don’t laugh, it wasn’t my choice – and she had this splendid red velvet concoction. Everyone made a great fuss of me and kept saying I’d be next, although I wasn’t too keen on that idea myself. It all got a bit much after a while and I snuck out to the garden where it was quiet to get some air. The weird thing was, I’d last seen Elizabeta in the ballroom, but there was somebody over by the gate to the rose garden facing away from me who I thought was her. She had the same hair and the same way of holding herself. Except rather than the red velvet, she was wearing my dress.” Carmilla trailed off and stared at the wall for a few moments.

“And then?” Laura prompted.

“And then just as she was turning around to face me, somebody cut my throat.” Laura gave a start and stroked Carmilla’s hand. It had been a foregone conclusion given the topic, but talk of her girlfriend’s death was always disturbing even if it had happened so long ago.

“If I saw her face I don’t remember it. The whole being-murdered thing is just a blank in my memory, everything until I woke up in Vordenberg's cellar evaporated right away. I never even knew who did it. Mother always denied it was her and said she’d just taken an unexpected opportunity when it arose. I was out cold – so to speak – for a week. But that’s not why I brought it up. It was Elizabeta, you see. I _thought_ it was Elizabeta, because I only saw her from behind and we had the same hair. I was sure it couldn’t have been anyone else. But she was wearing my dress.

“I always assumed I was remembering it wrong, or I’d got confused with all the champagne. But what if it wasn’t Elizabeta at all? What if the face I saw just at that very moment, the face I can’t remember, was my own?”

Laura stared at Carmilla's face, tense with thought. The girl's eyes were unfocused, her vision extending out across the centuries to try to recall the scene.

“So who _did_ I see when I met my death?” she asked.

* * *

Laura patted her face dry with a towel and tried to take in yesterday's many revelations. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Carmilla was telling the truth and that she – the real she – had been gone for two weeks. But how did that account for the face she saw looking back from the mirror? There were no bags under her eyes from restless nights, no weather-beaten skin from lying exposed somewhere for a fortnight. There was only the normal Laura Hollis – unweathered, fresh-faced from a night's sleep, newly dressed but still with a pile of wet hair needing to be brushed and dried.

The idea upset her. It shouldn't be possible for something this uncanny to happen without you knowing.

The conversation about Carmilla's death had upset her, too. It was in the past, of course, which is a foreign country. They do things differently there – and they are different people there as well. Laura wondered, not for the first time, what Carmilla had been like back in 1698. How recognisable would the naïve eighteen year old be to the cynical product of three centuries?

Mattie knew something about it. Laura had asked her, once, what she remembered of her younger sister. She had been willing to talk about details – seeing Electra in Paris in 1709, waking up with raging hangovers between the advancing lines at the Battle of Blenheim, amusing escapades of all sorts across the centuries. But she steered clear of discussing the girl's character in any substantive way.

After that conversation, Laura had rewatched one of her old videos. _As though you're the same girl who died at a ball in 1698_ , she said dismissively. _As though I'm the same girl who lived in a grass hut by the river. Time has already changed us, death has already changed us._

That, she thought, was why Mattie was so cagey about old stories. Carmilla would hardly have been recognisable. The girl who came back from the murder and the resurrection and the slaughter as she   
carved her way out of the Vordenberg dungeon was not the same girl who died looking for her sister. And then after the centuries of brooding and blood, and the loss of Ell and the coffin and the second resurrection in the bonfire of Europe – not the same person. Not the person she curled up with every night.

But her Carmilla was a better person than those other, past selves. Had grown into a better person.

A drop of water slid down her cheek and she reflexively captured it with her tongue. It was salty.

She clapped her hands to her cheeks, trying to brush away the unexpected tears – only to find that there were no tears. The errant bead had come from the mass of hair still wet from the shower. She wrung out a handful and thrust a finger into her mouth to check. There had been no mistake - the water still clinging to her from the shower was briny. 

In confusion her eyes met those of her reflection again. She swept away a couple of drops of water from her brow, and it took a few moments for the fact to sink in that her reflection didn’t change.

Experimentally she raised her right hand, but there was no movement in the mirror image of the Laura who faced her. She lowered it again, then pulled a face. The other Laura just looked at her, unmoving.

Then it raised its own right hand and balled it into a fist. Laura felt her stomach drop in terror and she shot straight back. The image moved so fast. She saw her reflection whip round and grab hold of the door handle in the mirrored double of the bathroom. Laura dived for the real handle and found it stuck, held shut by unearthly strength.

The reflected Laura turned round to face her again, hand still clasping the door shut behind her. She smiled just as Laura herself did, without the slightest hint of menace or threat. But then Laura felt the water starting to trickle down her face from the crown of her head – salty, smelling of seawater and brackish marshes.

It came first in isolated drops and then in trickles. The girl in the glass was already drenched, her hair falling lank and ragged around her shoulders, but her face twisted into a snarl of triumph. Laura screamed for Carmilla and heard from the other end of the cottage the smash of a door being flung open.

The water was freezing, and Laura found herself soaked through and shivering as her knees turned to jelly and she sank down to the floor. It seemed to be coming from everywhere as if from an unseen rainstorm, soaking through her clothes and splashing off her onto the floor. There was a pounding on the other side of the door and Carmilla’s voice shouting at her to open it, but she couldn’t move the handle.

All at once she choked. There was something blocking her airway and even her attempts to turn the handle dropped from her mind as she clawed at her throat trying to clear the blockage. The world was turning fuzzy and cold and she could only distantly register the voice from the corridor telling her to get out of the way before it burst into splinters.

Carmilla came through with her fists, breaking off the handle and hinges. She stepped straight over her collapsed and coughing body and put one unhesitating punch straight through the mirror.

Laura could offer neither assistance nor resistance to being dragged over to the bath and thumped on the back with enormous force, Carmilla holding her bent over the side. The tangle of seaweed dislodged itself and she coughed and spluttered a mixture of sea water and blood into the bath after it.

“We’ve got to kill it,” she heard Carmilla mutter as she held her, slumped on the floor that was covered in water and glass shards. “We’ve got to face it.”


	4. And They Part No More

“I really thought we were done with the fruitless research for the decade,” complained Laura as she sorted through a stack of paper covered mostly in crossed-out words. “We don't even have a library.”

The two sat in the middle of the spare room, the floor still covered in the piles of notes Carmilla made two days earlier. There were scribblings copied down from the internet, fragments of poems and stories, half-remembered snatches of lore from previous centuries.

“To be fair, we wouldn't know where to start if we did,” pointed out Carmilla with equanimity. “So really this is no problem.” She scrolled through her phone and jotted down a few more words onto the nearest sheet.

“Changelings, fetches, stocks – no good,” Laura muttered. “Don't explain the attack yesterday.” Her calves were exposed by her cut-off jeans and she rubbed absently at the little scratches where glass fragments had cut at her in the bathroom. “On the other hand, mirror-creatures of all sorts don't explain the original replacement.”

“Right. Pretty much all the lore about this or that focuses on tell-tale signs. But the taste of blood was the only sign for us, and that's a bit difficult to notice for most people.” Carmilla sighed. “Hints are all we're going to get – certain writers seem kind of obsessed with the idea of shadow selves. This is the piece I kept coming back to,” she added, and handed Laura the open copy of the works of Percy Shelley. One passage was ringed in red ink. 

_They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,_   
_The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,_   
_Met his own image walking in the garden._   
_That apparition, sole of men, he saw._   
_For know there are two worlds of life and death:_   
_One that which thou beholdest; but the other_   
_Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit_   
_The shadows of all forms that think and live,_   
_Till death unite them and they part no more;_   
_Dreams and the light imaginings of men,_   
_And all that faith creates or love desires,_   
_Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes._   
_There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade._

Laura tapped it with her finger. “Kind of spooky – anything more?” She turned the pages, looking for anything that might jump out.

“Nothing. It's just a plot mechanic. Prometheus summons up Jupiter's shade to question him about Jupiter himself. You know, the old summoning someone's ghost for a séance routine – only he's not actually dead yet. It stuck in my head because she knew everything about you. Which wouldn't have happened if she was just constructed one day.”

Laura pondered this for a while. “Suppose that makes sense,” she agreed. A sly smile crept over her face. “And anyone who looks like me is _definitely_ a sublime and beauteous shape.” Carmilla rolled her eyes and Laura meandered through the rest of the contents. Then her eyes widened as memory through up a flash card. “Him too!” She snapped her fingers.

“What?”

“Danny told me about Shelley. We were doing the Romantics in the first term, and she talked about him one of our pie date- Wednesday meet-ups,” she quickly corrected herself.

“Good old Ginger Giant,” Carmilla muttered.

“Don't be mean, Carm. She's your sister now.”

“Sisters have nicknames for each other! And because she's a very big sister, I have a very big list of nicknames for her. So what did Clifford tell you over lingering gazes?”

Laura rolled her eyes at Carmilla's reflexive jealousy. “Percy Shelley drowned at sea, right? Well, not long after he died his wife wrote a letter saying that he'd been seeing his double in the weeks beforehand. Only on the last occasion somebody else saw it too.”

“And this was after he wrote the play? So he'd been having, what, suspicions for a while?”

“Must have been.” Laura rubbed her temple and thought. “Shadows and forms, shadows and forms… why do I feel that's a familiar pair of words?”

Carmilla shrugged. “Plato – the forms are the true beings, which cast the shadows from which this unreal world is made.”

“Cast on _what_?” Laura wanted to know.

“No idea - can't stand Plato. Don't read him if I can at all avoid it. The cave of non-being or something.” She paused. “But you're more real than she is, so don't go down that route. None of this heavenly twin nonsense.” She saw Laura looking confused and tried to explain. “This book J.P. lent me. Some bizarre heresy – it's fiction, but it kind of sounds like it's based on some genuine weird cult.” She fished the little volume of stories from its place in the pile and read:

_“They imagined that all men are two men and that the real one is the other, the one in heaven. They also imagined that our acts project an inverted reflection, in such a way that if we are awake, the other sleeps. When we die, we shall join this other and be him.”_

“Till death unite them and they part no more,” said Laura. She let that sink in for a while and a light started to dawn in her eyes. “And you saw somebody who looked just like you in the moment before you died-”

“We don't know if that's connected,” put in Carmilla. “Could be a totally different thing. Could still be me misremembering.”

“Carm, you _saw_ her! You saw your own shade when you died!” Laura. “The other is underneath the grave...” The ideas were coming fast but still hovered just out of reach. She fumbled with the words. “You saw her come to you because you were going to her…

_“And I will show you something different from either_   
_Your shadow at morning striding behind you_   
_Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;”_

She quoted the lines from memory and then jumped up and started pacing around the room, absently waving her hands. “That's Eliot. Hooray for English Lit. classes! _Who is the third who walks always beside you?_ ” She stopped, and turned trembling to Carmilla.

“Death. Death, Carm.”

Carmilla put down the book she was holding and rose to take Laura's hands and press them together in stillness. “Death doesn't wear a face, cupcake. It's not like in the movies with a big skeleton and a scythe. It's not… it's non-being. The primordial abyss without form. Trust me on this. You fall into it and it covers you.”

“And when you're falling into it, whose face do you see reflected back?”

Carmilla was silent. It was no more than a house of cards constructed out of fragments of metaphor. But – it occurred to her looking at the sudden certainty in Laura's eyes – it was a house of cards constructed by someone who had dreamed of her replacement's activities while sleepwalking over that foreign sea. Someone with a connection.

“Why now?” she asked eventually, non-committally and without giving voice to the possibilities in her head.

“I don't know,” Laura shook her head. “Maybe she's bored. Maybe she's hungry. Maybe she's decided she'd prefer our places switched.”

“If you're right, Laura – we can't win.”

But Laura's face broke into a beaming smile. “ _I_ can win,” she said.

* * *

“The beach,” said Laura to her reflection in one of the two remaining mirrors in the cottage - which followed her motions as reflections always do, and with no hint of yesterday's misbehaviour. “Now,” she insisted. Carmilla unscrewed the mirror and turned it to face the living room wall.

“The beach,” said Laura to her reflection in the little mirror in the hallway. “Now.” Carmilla took it down and turned it to face the wall.

“The beach,” said Laura to her reflection in the largest of the shattered fragments in the bathroom. “Now.” Carmilla carefully piled the glass back into the rubbish bag and tied the top, careful to let no light get in.

Together they left the cottage and walked down the path to the beach. Laura felt the stilled tension in Carmilla's hand; Carmilla felt the subdued trembling in Laura's.

A squall was beginning to blow in from the sea and the late morning sun was feeble behind a cloud. They could see the weather front coming far out at sea as they crested the dunes. Already before them the waves were riding higher and higher with little white breakers, and sudden gusts caught the rumpled surface of the water, throwing spasms of ripples across it. Gulls were screaming overhead, but fewer and fewer of them were willing to brave the winds and they were seeking shelter amongst the battered pines. Out in the distance the horizon dissolved into a blue-grey smudge – the trace of a band of rain.

They took up station a few feet from the edge of the surf and waited. Carmilla could hear Laura's heart thumping inside her chest, but the girl did not move while she stared out at the oncoming storm.

“It's her,” said Laura eventually. Carmilla looked around, uncomprehending. “No – there. See?” She pointed out to where a small dark smudge hovered before the advancing front of the rain. As they watched it got larger.

She walked across the sea, stepping neatly over wave crests. Despite the growing ferocity of the weather she did not hurry or shrink back. She was in her element. As her figure grew larger, first Carmilla and then Laura were able to see how her feet seemed to tread just a fraction of an inch below the water’s surface. Laura shivered at the sight of her own body being worn so naturally.

The creature reached a point close to the shore where the submerged sand was only ankle-deep and allowed herself to step through the water and onto the sand beneath it. She wore no shoes – the only difference in dress between her and Laura – and waded through the surf to stand, wavelets lapping at her feet, before the two girls.

The traces of the days she had spent impersonating Laura – the bite mark on her neck, the scratch on her shin – were gone, but instead she wore the appropriate scratches for today's Laura. There were a scattering of little scratches on her arms and lower legs where Laura had encountered shards of glass in the bathroom. Even her clothes, calf-length jeans and t-shirt, were precisely right.

Laura took a breath. There had been the sketches of a speech planned in her head, a great confrontation and encounter. It evaporated under the gaze of her own eyes.

“Hey,” she squeaked instead, and cursed herself for the absurdity.

“Hey,” responded the thing with her face. The pitch and tone was as matched as if she had been playing back a recording.

“You’re wearing my face,” she said. “If I am Laura, who are you?”

“You are who _I_ am,” was the reply. “If I’m wearing your face, Laura.”

Carmilla took half a pace forward and raised her fist in threat. “You can shut up with that,” she said in a low, threatening voice. “I’ve destroyed you once, I can do it again. Only this time it won’t be so quick.”

Laura reached out and laid her hand on Carmilla’s. “Don’t, Carm. It won’t help.”

“Carm – don’t help,” Laura’s double added. “It won’t do.” She reached out to brush Carmilla’s still upraised fist for a moment. Laura caught a brief spark of static as their own fingers made contact.

“What brought you here?” Laura asked. “To me?”

“You brought me to here,” she replied, and as Laura flinched and tucked a hand behind her back, the image of her did the same.

Laura frowned. “You’re using my words. Or almost. Not quite…”

“Your words are almost mine. Not quite ‘yours’,” she replied, and for the first time her voice took on a different tone – mocking, cold, quite unlike the imitation of Lara it had been performing up to that moment.

“Are you even real?” Laura asked.

“Are you even real?” came the reply.

“I think you’re just an echo. There’s nothing there at all, is there?”

“Is there nothing?” she answered. “There’s an echo, you’re thinking.”

Laura moved closer, inspected the smiling creature’s eyes. “You don’t belong here now. You should go. If you are what I think you are, we’ll meet in time. Why not be patient?”

She cocked her head. “Oh sweetie, that misses the point entirely. If you’re flattering yourself that you have the faintest idea who I am, you’ll know that _now_ and _then_ aren’t really the question. The important thing is – I am here.” Laura jumped in shock as the creature discarded the mimicry and dropped the last vestiges of Laura’s intonation.

“How's your throat?” asked the double. “A bit sore? Got something stuck in it?” She made a sympathetic face. “Or are you busy worrying about the first signs of ageing? One day, Laura, you'll look in the mirror and not recognise the face looking back. Now wouldn't it be nice to be free of that? To just dream eternity away?”

“You know what you are, cupcake? You're a wave. You rise up and no sooner are you risen than you start crashing down again. Just a wave on the surface. Now Carm and I,” she turned to face Carmilla, who was vibrating with anger, “are like the deeps. We endure. We're always there. We're where the waves come from, and where they return to. And they're amusing for a season. But they don't last. What do you think, Carm? Had time to decide what you want from eternity?”

Laura shot a sideways glance at Carmilla.

“I want,” Carmilla said clearly to them both, “the original of Laura. Nothing more. Nothing less.” She took a breath. “Now go and crawl back into whatever chasm you came from.”

“Or what? _Her_ life is _my_ life,” she waved a hand at Laura, who started at the bold statement, “so you have a choice. I can live the dear cupcake’s life with you in my bed beside me – or with you staked out in your coffin. There's no her without me - and you won't do a thing to stop me.”

“No.” Laura pulled Carmilla back and stepped forward. “No, she won’t. But I will.” She felt herself on the edge of a precipice. Everything came very sharply into focus. The sand sinking gently under her feet. The sharp edges of the wind plucking at her sleeves. The rippling browns in the irises of her double standing in front of her. But one of these things was not real.

The thing sneered. “Little soul, brief soul, anything you can do I can do better. Anything you remember, I remember dreaming. Anything you’ve said, I’ve heard the echoes.”

Laura came closer until they were in touching distance. She felt heat radiating off the creature's body, such a contrast to the chill wind. “I know. And when you were here, I heard the echoes and had the dreams. So we are linked.” The thing smirked triumphantly at her. “This thing of darkness,” said Laura clearly, “I acknowledge mine.”

She took hold of the thing’s face and kissed her on the lips. 

The creature stiffened and the muscles of her neck stood out. She seemed unwilling but could not pull away, and as Laura wrapped her arms around the thing's waist, she clamped her own hands to Laura's shoulders heavily in a way that somehow reminded Carmilla of both sleepwalking and automation. They folded into a predetermined arrangement, as if they had been waiting for the kiss all their lives. Their bodies fit together. She saw Laura's chest swell as she breathed in from the mouth pressed tight against hers.

The creature sagged in the embrace and began to waver. It was not what Carmilla saw when she destroyed her last body. Then she had collapsed into water and rejoined the sea, but under Laura’s treatment she began to evaporate into mist. She shuddered, rippled, a great gust of wind took her – and then the figure was gone and scattered to the air.

* * *

The squall from the sea had blown itself out as quickly as it had come in, and the sun was back. Laura and Carmilla sat down on the worn, slightly rain-dampened wooden bench in their tiny garden and enjoyed the warmth. The seabirds were far up in the air or flocking around the marshes, leaving the surrounds of the cottage free for a miscellany of sparrows and finches to squabble over the first seeds blown loose.

“And you’re sure about the blood?” Laura asked, rubbing the new puncture marks on the inside of her forearm.

Carmilla nodded. “It’s all fine. You’re definitely your normal self. A little too much sugar for my taste, but overall very palatable.” Laura swatted her shoulder.

“How did you know what to do?” she asked.

Laura shrugged. “Guesswork. And of course _she_ knew what would kill her, so some of that must have come through. I thought: if you meet your double when you die they take you. So maybe if you meet them early you can take them. Home turf advantage. Something along those lines anyway.”

“So you do think that's what she was? Your Death?”

“Could be. Or something similar, some other shadowy reflection. But whatever she was she was mine. My own little piece of non-being.”

“You're poetic today,” Carmilla commented.

Laura laughed. “I'm happy!” She tossed her head about a bit as the laughing went on until she finally subsided and curled up in the crook of Carmilla's shoulder.

“You’ve still got the grey hairs,” Carmilla observed as she passed her fingers through the mass of brown with three imperceptible slices of grey. “I was slightly hoping they might have been part of her.”

Laura giggled again. “Nope! Authentic human ageing here.” She paused. “It’ll be interesting to see if I get any more.”

Carmilla frowned. “But you will. Obviously. Won’t you?”

Laura kicked the leg of the chair absently. “Don’t know now. The other one is gone. I can’t very well meet her at the end of my life, because she won't be around any more. No deeps for the wave to fall back into. So how am I going to die now?” She looked up at her girlfriend's face and gave a bright smile.

Carmilla stared into her beaming face with growing realization. “You mean…” she began, and the sun that was shining from the sky started to rise inside her as well.

“I _mean_ ,” said Laura firmly, “that I don’t know exactly what I did earlier and I don’t know what it might mean. But if I’ve no longer got anyone hurrying me forward to meet my death, and if there's no longer any trace of me in – whatever the place I went to was... Well, let’s just wait and see, shall we?” She reached up to kiss Carmilla's jaw and then settled back into her embrace.

The two girls sat together in the sunshine drenching their little cottage. They listened to the gentle lapping of waves on the beach and the rustling of leaves in the garden. Around them the day was bright and fresh and far up in the sky gulls hung on the wind, watching the rising and falling of the formless sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quotation from Eliot is from _The Wasteland_.
> 
> Is it acceptable for me to write fics that are basically thin webs of Hollstein stringing together bits of poetry I like? Well, I don't think I could stop myself if I tried.


End file.
